HONG KONG (TheBlaze/AP) — Nearly a full day after it began, the anti-government protests ravaging Hong Kong are still going strong.

Police used tear gas on Sunday to try to clear thousands of pro-democracy protesters who had gathered outside government headquarters in a challenge to Beijing over its decision to restrict democratic reforms for the city.

After spending hours holding the protesters at bay, police lobbed canisters of tear gas into the crowd on Sunday evening. The searing fumes sent protesters fleeing down the road, but many came right back to continue their demonstration.

Watch the protests live below:

Students and activists have been camped out on the streets outside the government complex all weekend. Students started the rally, but by early Sunday leaders of the broader Occupy Central civil disobedience movement said they were joining them to kick-start a long-threatened mass sit-in to demand an election for Hong Kong’s leader without Beijing’s interference.

Authorities launched their crackdown after the protest spiraled into an extraordinary scene of chaos as the protesters jammed a busy road and clashed with officers wielding pepper spray.

The protesters were trying tried to reach a mass sit-in being held outside government headquarters to demand Beijing grant genuine democratic reforms to the former British colony.

The demonstrations — which Beijing called “illegal” — were a rare scene of disorder in the Asian financial hub, and highlighted authorities’ inability to get a grip on the public discontent over Beijing’s tightening grip on the city. The protesters reject Beijing’s recent decision to restrict voting reforms for the first-ever elections to choose Hong Kong’s leader, promised for 2017.

Earlier Sunday, thousands of protesters who tried to join the sit-in breached a police cordon, spilling out onto a busy highway and causing traffic to come to a standstill.

Police officers in a buffer zone manned barricades and doused the protesters with pepper spray carried in backpacks. The demonstrators, who tried at one point to rip apart metal barricades, carried umbrellas to deflect the spray by the police, who were wearing helmets and respirators.

Police had told those involved in what they also call an illegal gathering to leave the scene as soon as possible, warning that otherwise they would begin to clear the area and make arrests.

The use of the tear gas angered the protesters, who chanted “Shame on C.Y. Leung” after it was used, referring to the city’s deeply unpopular Beijing-backed leader, Leung Chun-ying. To many, it also seemed to mark a major shift for Hong Kong, whose residents have long felt their city stood apart from mainland China thanks to its guaranteed civil liberties and separate legal and financial systems.

Hong Kong “has changed to a new era so the people have to be awakened. It’s no longer the old Hong Kong,” said one protester, W.T. Chung, 46, who yelled at police officers after they used tear gas.

Earlier, police said they had arrested 78 people since demonstrations started late Friday, though all but three were released.

Leung said Hong Kong’s government was “resolute in opposing the unlawful occupation” of the government offices or the financial district by Occupy Central.

“The police are determined to handle the situation appropriately in accordance with the law,” he said at a news conference.

The Chinese government agency that handles Hong Kong affairs condemned the protests.

“China’s central government firmly opposes illegal acts taking place in Hong Kong,” and fully supports the local government in handling the matter according to the law, the official Xinhua News Agency quoted the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office of the State Council as saying.

Protest organizers said police took away several pro-democracy legislators who were among the demonstrators.

Among the protesters was media magnate Jimmy Lai, who owns the popular Apple Daily, Hong Kong’s sole pro-democracy newspaper.

Scientists broke into wild cheers Wednesday morning as the orbiter’s engines completed 24 minutes of burn time and maneuvered into its designated place around the red planet.

The success of India’s Mars Orbiter Mission, affectionately nicknamed MOM, brings India into an elite club of Martian explorers that includes United States, the European Space Agency and the former Soviet Union.

NASA’s Maven spacecraft entered orbit around Mars late Sunday following a 442-million-mile journey that began nearly a year ago. Photo: AP/NASA

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—NASA’s Maven spacecraft entered orbit around Mars for an unprecedented study of the red planet’s atmosphere following a 442 million-mile journey that began nearly a year ago.

The robotic explorer successfully slipped into orbit around the red planet late Sunday night.

“I think my heart’s about ready to start again,” Maven’s chief investigator, Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado, said early Monday. “All I can say at this point is, ‘We’re in orbit at Mars, guys!'”

Now the real work begins for the $671 million mission, the first dedicated to studying the Martian upper atmosphere and the latest step in NASA’s bid to send astronauts to Mars in the 2030s.

Flight controllers in Colorado will spend the next six weeks adjusting Maven’s altitude and checking its science instruments, and observing a comet streaking by at relatively close range. Then in early November, Maven will start probing the upper atmosphere of Mars. The spacecraft will conduct its observations from orbit; it isn’t meant to land.

Scientists believe the Martian atmosphere holds clues as to how Earth’s neighbor went from being warm and wet billions of years ago to cold and dry. That early wet world may have harbored microbial life, a tantalizing question yet to be answered.

NASA launched Maven, the 10th U.S. mission sent to orbit the red planet, last November from Cape Canaveral. Three earlier missions failed and until the official word came of success late Sunday night, the entire team was on edge.

“I don’t have any fingernails any more, but we’ve made it,” said Colleen Hartman, deputy director for science at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It’s incredible.”

The spacecraft was traveling at more than 10,000 mph when it hit the brakes for the so-called orbital insertion, a half-hour process. The world had to wait 12 minutes to learn the outcome once it occurred because of the lag in receiving signals from the spacecraft.

“Wow, what a night. You get one shot with Mars orbit insertion, and Maven nailed it tonight,” said NASA project manager David Mitchell.

Maven joins three spacecraft already circling Mars, two American and one European. And the traffic jam isn’t over: India’s first interplanetary probe, Mangalyaan, will reach Mars in two days and aim for orbit. Mr. Jakosky wished the team well.

Mr. Jakosky, who is with the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder, hopes to learn where all the water on Mars went, along with the carbon dioxide that once comprised an atmosphere thick enough to hold moist clouds.

The gases may have been stripped away by the sun early in Mars’ existence, escaping into the upper atmosphere and out into space. Maven’s observations should be able to extrapolate back in time, Mr. Jakosky said.

Maven, short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission, will spend at least one Earth year—about half a Martian one—collecting data. Its orbit will dip as low as 78 miles above the Martian surface as its eight instruments make measurements. The craft is as long as a school bus, from solar wingtip to tip, and as hefty as an SUV.

Lockheed Martin Corp. LMT -1.03% , which made Maven, is operating the mission from its control center at Littleton, Colorado.

While Israel and Arab states use Arab acronym Daesh, most world knows radical Islamist force as either ISIS or ISIL, but PR-savvy terror group prefer you drop the specifics and just stick with Islamic State.

Associated Press
Published: 09.12.14, 23:20 / Israel News

Propaganda has been one of the core strategies of the Sunni militant group in Syria and Iraq that today calls itself the Islamic State – and its name is very much a part of that.

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In July, the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, announced its rebranding. He declared that the territory under his control would be part of a caliphate, or an Islamic state, shortening its name from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL – the acronym used by the Obama administration and the British Foreign Office to this day. The Levant can refer to all countries bordering on the eastern Mediterranean, from Greece to Egypt.

ISIS or ‘Daesh’ supporters in Syria (Photo: AP)

Different translations for the name of the al-Qaeda splinter group have emerged since the early days of its existence.

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Some have chosen to call it the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. The final word in Arabic – al-Sham – can be translated as Levant, Syria, or as Damascus.

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Arab governments have long refrained from using Islamic State, instead referring to it by the Arabic acronym for its full original name, Daesh – short for Dawlat al-Islamiyah f’al-Iraq w Belaad al-Sham – Israel and its leaders also use the Arabic acronym.

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Several residents in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city which fell to the extremist group in June, told The Associated Press that the militants threatened to cut the tongue of anyone who publicly used the acronym Daesh, instead of referring to the group by its full name, saying it shows defiance and disrespect. The residents spoke anonymously out of fear for their safety.

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The inconsistency, while confusing for some, has not deterred the group’s growing exposure on social media, with so many hashtags, posts and tweets ultimately directing readers and viewers to their news. Despite being associated to about a half-dozen names and acronyms, the group’s brutal objectives are becoming increasingly clear.

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Prior to the group’s self-declared rebranding in July, The Associated Press opted to refer to it as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, believing it was the most accurate translation.

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The AP now uses phrases like “the Islamic State group,” or “fighters from the Islamic State group,” to avoid phrasing that sounds like they could be fighting for an internationally recognized state.

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“The word ‘state’ implies a system of administration and governance,” said David L. Phillips, the director of Peace-Building and Rights Program at Columbia University. “It’s not a term that would be used to characterize a terrorist group or militia that is merely rolling up territory.”

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“Part of their strategy is to establish administration over lands that they control so that they demonstrate that they are more than just a fighting force,” Phillips added. Equally problematic is the use of the word “Islamic” in its name, with some calling it blasphemous.

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On Wednesday, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius referred to the group as Daesh, calling them “butchers” who do not represent Islam or a state. He urged others to do the same.

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Egypt’s top Islamic authority, Grand Mufti Ibrahim Negm, last month called on the international community to refer to the group as “al-Qaida separatists” and not the Islamic State.

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“Their savage acts don’t coincide with the name of Islam,” said Sunni cleric Hameed Marouf Hameed, an official with Iraq’s Sunni religious endowment. “They incite hatred, violence and killing and these acts have no place in any real Islamic state.”

REDIPUGLIA, Italy (AP) — Pope Francis urged the world Saturday to shed its apathy in the face of what he characterizes as a third world war, intoning “war is madness” at the foot of a grandiose monument to soldiers killed in World War I.

Francis’ aim in recalling those who died in the Great War that broke out 100 years ago was to honor the victims of all wars, and it came at a time when his calls for peace have grown ever more urgent amid new threats in the Middle East and Ukraine.

Russia, in green, has been accused of covertly invading its smaller neighbor Ukraine, and fighting in Syria, in orange, helped give rise to the Islamic State now threatening a large swath of the Middle East. (Image via Wikimedia Commons)

Standing at an altar beneath the towering Redipuglia memorial entombing 100,000 Italian soldiers fallen in World War I, the pope said “even today, after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction.”

Pope Francis celebrates an open-air mass in front of the Italy’s largest war memorial, in Fogliano Redipuglia, northern Italy, Saturday, Sept. 13, 2014. Pope Francis has urged the world to shed its apathy in the face of what he sees as a third world war, intoning “war is madness” during a homily at the foot of a Fascist-era World War I monument near the Slovene border. (AP Photo/Paolo Giovannini)

The visit was also infused with intensely personal meaning. The pope’s grandfather fought in Italy’s 1915-17 offensive against the Austro-Hungarian empire waged in the nearby battlefields, surviving to impress upon the future pope the horror of war.

The Italian word “Presente”, refering to a symbolic role call of the fallen soldiers, is engraved on the steps of Italy’s largest war memorial as an Italian Bersagliere trooper stands by a flame during an open-air mass by Pope Francis in front of the monument, in Fogliano Redipuglia, northern Italy, Saturday, Sept. 13, 2014. Pope Francis has urged the world to shed its apathy in the face of what he sees as a third world war, intoning “war is madness” during a homily at the foot of a Fascist-era World War I monument near the Slovene border. (AP Photo/Paolo Giovannini)

An Italian defense ministry official presented the pope with his grandfather’s military record during the commemorations, and the parents of an Italian soldier killed in Afghanistan last year presented Francis with the distinctive feathered Bersagliere cap worn by the Piedmontese corps, famed for a rugged endurance epitomized by their tradition of marching at a jog.

Francis’ grandfather, who hailed from the Piedmont region, belonged to the corps, said Redipuglia parish priest the Rev. Duilio Nardin.

The military records showed that the pope’s grandfather, Giovanni Carlo Bergoglio, was a radio operator during the Isonzo campaign aimed at piercing the Austro-Hungarian defenses. The 12 battles are memorialized at the Redipuglia monument which was dedicated by Italy’s Fascist government in 1938 on the eve of World War II.

The elder Bergoglio, who was drafted at age 31 as Italy entered the war, obtained a certificate of good conduct and 200 lire at the war’s end, according to documents discovered by the Italian bishops’ conference’s media outlets. With postwar Italy’s economy stalled, he emigrated to Argentina where the future pontiff — Jorge Mario Bergoglio — was born.

The pope in the past has recalled the “many painful stories from the lips of my grandfather.”

Before arriving at the monument, the pope prayed privately among the neat rows of gravestones for fallen soldiers from five nations buried in a tidy Austro-Hungarian cemetery just a couple of hundred of meters (yards) away.

In his homily during an open-air Mass at the Italian monument, the pope remembered the victims of every war — up to today.

“Today, too, the victims are many,” fallen to behind-the-scenes “interests, geopolitical strategies, lust for money and power,” the pope said.

He lamented that the human toll of “senseless massacres” and “mindless wars” has been met with apathy. Francis urged: “Humanity needs to weep, and this is the time to weep.”

The enduring impact of World War I, 100 years on, is evident in the visitors who continue to make pilgrimages to the monument, although in ever decreasing numbers, said Fogliano di Redipuglia Mayor Antonio Calligaris.

“The Repiduglia sanctuary until 20 years ago was always full of visitors, but it has been forgotten by institutional memory,” Calligaris said. “The papal visit is very important because it renews attention on this history.”

Days before the papal visit, several dozen mostly elderly visitors scaled the 22 granite levels reaching dramatically upward toward three towering crosses that point skyward. The largest Italian war memorial, Redipuglia entombs 100,000 Italian soldiers killed in battle, 60,000 whose identity remains unknown and 40,000 who were identified.

The nearby Austro-Hungarian cemetery, one of several in the area, contains 14,406 dead from five nations that fought under the Austro-Hungarian empire, only 2,406 identified. Among recent tributes is a Hungarian flag signed in July by relatives of a soldier named Istvan Arnter, who died on Nov. 20, 1917.

Many visitors to the Italian monument search the engraved names for their forbears.

Pope Francis prays at the gravestones of an Austro-Hungarian cemetery in Fogliano di Redipuglia, northern Italy, Saturday, Sept. 13, 2014. Pope Francis will confront a piece of his own family history when he visits a World War I memorial Saturday built amid the battlefields where his grandfather fought in the brutal Italian offensive against the Austro-Hungarian empire, surviving to impress upon the future pope the horrors of war. Francis’ aim is by recalling those who died in the first World War that broke out 100 years ago is to honor the victims of all wars, and it comes at a time when his calls for peace have grown ever more urgent amid new threats. The pontiff will pray first among the neat rows of gravestones for fallen soldiers from five nations buried a tidy, enclosed Austro-Hungarian cemetery, then travel by car just a couple of hundred meters to Italy’s largest war memorial, a grandiose Fascist-era monument to 100,000 fallen Italian soldiers, for an open-air mass. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

“They are making a lot of saints these days. Even popes,” said Margherita Braga, 52, of Brescia, who was visiting the site with her Italian military veteran husband. “But for me, these are the real saints.”

Just two levels up from the altar where Francis stood, the name of a fallen soldier named Adolfo Bergoglio is engraved in a wall. Nardin, the local priest, said he is not believed to be related to the pope. But World War I historian, Col. Lorenzo Cadeddu, who has found two Bergoglios listed among the Italian casualties of World War I, said it remained a possibility.

“Bergoglio is not a common name,” Cadeddu said. “It is likely that they are related.”